Still Telling Stories

The truth is I’m a thrill seeker.  It’s the reason that I picked up a pair of sticks in the sixth grade and decided to be rock and roll drummer in some stoner band.  By the seventh grade, I was the only female marching in the drum line during Friday night football games. At that time girls had to wear skirts to play on the drum line, so I had a metal drum buckled onto my flesh. I nearly early broke my leg running up and down the field, but I got to play alongside the other male band members.

Other thrills were not of my making. 

1969 Midwest City, Oklahoma.  I was home sick from my airport waitress job when a T-F-100 Super Sabre training jet crashed next door and took out three more houses in our Glenwood neighborhood block.  Our house was under the flight path of Tinker Field’s Air Force base.  The crashed blew out all our windows, and set fire to an entire block of houses.  The pilot ejected and landed in our front yard; the co-pilot was trapped inside the cockpit burning alive. I grabbed my dog Ginger, wrapped her in a towel and ran down the street with hot electrical wires popping around us like firecrackers. 

1971, Joey, my 11-month-old son and I were on our way to see my family living in Wiesbaden, Germany.  The Boeing 747 aircraft operated by TWA was set to leave New York Kennedy International airport at 8 p.m.  A few minutes after takeoff one of the engines blew up, and was on fire.  The airliner rocked and vibrated. Joey and I were in a window seat and I could see smoke billowing out of one of the engines. I covered him with my body and a pillow thinking that if the plane crashed, he might live if I didn’t.  We lived and at some point, I went back to school to learn how to write and tell stories that might thrill, amaze, and perhaps scare the hell out of readers because they still scare me.  From Oklahoma to Germany, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, Gaza, Ireland, England, and Georgia, I’m still here, and telling what I’ve seen and where I’ve been.